Golden Chains
by NotsoSugarQueen
Summary: "We are bound to this life by a golden chain, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop." Tessa Gray has lived the life she always dreamed of living with Will Herondale, but when he goes where she cannot follow, all she can think about is that maybe, everyone has a curse. Hers just happens to be disguised as a gift. Oneshot. Please R&R!


**Golden Chains-**

**A.N.- Okay, so its my first Infernal Devices fanfic, and I'm just shooting for a oneshot, unless enough people beg me to make it a multichapter fanfiction, but I doubt that I'll have the time. So, I'm just going to see where it goes. Enjoy!**

Tessa PoV

She screamed again, sitting bolt upright. Tears clouded her eyesight, streamed down her face, dripped onto her nightgown and spattered the covers. It was there again, the nightmare, with that ghost of him flickering just beyond her reach. She could still picture his face, as if it was burned onto the insides of her eyelids, every time she closed them: dark violet-blue eyes, the silky black hair, the irresistible sparkling smile that never dimmed with age. The other side of her bed cold and empty.

Will.

Her Will.

Gone.

Her cries slowed to gasps, sputtering sobs. Blue lights flickered near the doorway, and light footsteps made their way across the floor towards the mattress where she was sleeping. Magnus. His cat eyes were soft and open with sympathy, and he sat down beside her. She sobbed again, wordlessly accepting his embrace. He smelled of turpentine and smoke.

"Shhhhh…" he whispered, rocking her from side to side gently. "The first one is always the hardest." At that, she cried harder. The shoulder of his nightshirt was getting soaked, but at the moment, Tessa reasoned, he didn't seem to mind too much. And she didn't really care either.

"You say that, but Will is my one and only. I will never have another love like him. Ever. Whether I live a hundred years or a hundred thousand, it doesn't matter. There will never be another Will Herondale. And Jem is…" she broke into a fresh outbreak of sobs. Will had finally gone to the place she could not follow, and now his parabatai couldn't follow him either, preserved in time within the Bone City.

She was alone.

Well, except from Magnus, but in the terms of which she was thinking, he didn't count. She wondered, sometimes, how he had managed it for the past five hundred or so years. Moving from lover to lover, loving them each the same, but accepting their deaths quietly and moving on. Fettered to life by the golden chain of immortality.

"It'll get easier," he assured her in a soft voice. "Someday, we will cease to feel anything at all. Neither love nor hate will matter."

"I don't want to forget," she told him fiercely, almost angry. "I don't want to forget him. He is everything I ever wanted and everything that I have lost, in the end. And I knew it all along. And I will never stand with him on the banks of the great river, as he called it, and cross it with him. I will never be reborn. The Wheel will not turn for me, no matter what Jem promises."

"It all depends on what you believe," Magnus remarked. "Perhaps we will be reborn. After all, nothing is set in stone. Perhaps that every soul has one chance at immortality, one chance at a living forever, and this is our chance. And even if that is not true, then Will Herondale will be reborn, and his soul will find you. I am sure of it. Love that strong outlasts all kinds of hardships; including lives. And I have never seen love like the love between the two of you."

Tessa sniffled and shivered suddenly cold. She tugged the covers up around her, the tears sticky on her skin. _Will would want me to live_, she thought. _He, of all people, knew that there was more to living than not dying. That was a lesson that Jem taught him well._ She laughed bitterly at the thought of it. Woolsey Scott was right. She had been lucky, to have had two great loves, however brief they had turned out to be, in comparison to the endlessness of her immortality that stretched out in front of her.

"Life will go on," Magnus promised.

Tessa bit her lip, and felt like screaming in despair at the injustice of it all. "I don't want life to go on. Not without him. The emptiness is too much. It hurts, so badly, like someone is ripping my heart out again and again, every minute of the day." She closed her eyes, and fresh tears welled out from between the lashes.

She hated this stupid golden chain, however much of a gift it was supposed to be. It wasn't a gift. It was a curse in disguise. The worst kind.

**So that concludes my little oneshot. Hopefully you liked it, and I ask you to please review. I love constructive criticism, seeing as to the fact that that's how I improve my writing. Thanks so much for reading!**

**-NotsoSugarQueen**


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